EMILE RUBINO

Emile Rubino, Illustration, 2024. Photo credit: Useful Art Services. Courtesy the artist and LambdaLambdaLambda

EMILE RUBINO in conversation with Lucas Blalock.

Lucas Blalock: Your show of recent photographs at LambdaLamdaLambda was called Illustration. This strikes me as a funny quality of photography to foreground in an exhibition, an idea reiterated in the exhibition text written by Aaron Peck. Can you talk a little about where this is coming from?

Emile Rubino: Photography is always tasked with illustrating. It was very productive for me to recognize that it’s actually rather bad at it. To some extent, a photograph is always ambiguous and even when photography attempts to forgo its inevitable ambiguities, it often ends up creating new ones that are potentially even more confounding. I find this shortcoming of photography to be fascinating because depending on how you handle it, you can make a picture do very different things through minor gestures. So I began to use the notion of illustration as a lens or a prism through which I could consider photography. For instance, I started noticing different kinds of pictures where objects were stacked on top of one another or placed side by side in the most literal way, like simple mathematical equations (i.e Euro bills + heater = energy precarity, or again, white eggs + brown egg = discrimination)… Photography has a long and strange history related to equations as a way to make sense of things that can't be rationalized. To explain the modernist concept of Equivalency, a photographer like Minor White also used an equation, which went like: ‘Photograph + Person Looking ↔ Mental Image.’

Illustration came as a way of giving myself license to overthink these seemingly simple equations by foregrounding photography’s brilliant dumbness. But I also came to focus my attention on illustration by thinking about the way in which it perfectly encapsulates photography’s forever ambiguous position between art and non-art. Both photography and illustration can be considered to be petit métiers, and their histories are materially intertwined. On a commercial level photography posed a threat to illustrators (more than painters) in the 19th century, which is partly why many of the first commercial photography studios were opened by illustrators and caricaturists like Nadar.

I’ve always been fascinated by the work of the great illustrator and caricaturist Honoré Daumier who was very much in the back of my mind in the making of this exhibition; especially his famous caricature of Nadar in his air balloon with the witty caption: ‘Nadar elevating photography to the heights of art.’ In the realm of art, to say that something is ‘merely illustrative’ is a commonly accepted form of criticism; it is as common as saying that a work is ‘derivative.’ So here I am embracing and celebrating both the illustrative and also the derivative nature of photography. But other artists do that too in very different ways. I recently learned that Torbjørn Rødland used to be an editorial cartoonist, which makes so much sense. His best pictures work like cartoonish jokes and illustrations pushed to an extreme.

Today, photography continues to occupy an ambiguous position between art and non-art. But I would argue that this indeterminate position is actually one of photography’s greatest strengths because it holds a subversive political and artistic potential. As an outward-looking medium, photography is also inevitably derivative as it always seeks to mimic, copy or emulate aspects of other mediums such as painting—just as much as it mimics and copies ‘the real.’ For better or worse, photography’s equivocal position as art (but also its inferiority complex) is still the engine that keeps the medium moving: both forward and backward… So illustration (or illustrating illustration so to speak) struck me as a relatively unassuming way to think about much bigger questions pertaining to the contentious history of photography’s political potential.

Emile Rubino, Samozveri, 2024. Photo credit: Useful Art Services. Courtesy the artist and LambdaLambdaLambda

To ground this discussion a little more, I would say that the starting point in the studio was Alexander Rodchenko’s series of photo-illustrations called Samozveri (Auto-Animals), which were made for a Soviet children’s book. This series captured my imagination, and I enjoyed the silliness of the discrepancy between the revolutionary intention of making ‘photo-illustrations’ as a new, radical and avant-garde way of picture-making, while doing so by staging still lifes with cute paper cut-out figurines. My version of this is just a bit more anxiety provoking than Rodenchko’s, because I’m not very good at cutting out smiley faces properly, and because the world is a dark place these days.

LB: The Rodchenko remake is just one of several nods to moments in progressive or revolutionary pedagogy. When looking at this group together it feels like I’m being invited into a visual literacy seminar with footnotes.

ER: It’s funny you say that because at some point in the making of this show I did actually start to think about it as if I was writing an essay by other means. On paper that doesn’t sound like a great way to make art, but somehow it felt OK here. This quasi-literary approach to making the work made sense with the idea of illustration. But maybe I’m just spending too much time writing art criticism on the side and it’s starting to affect my work.

I hope I’m not starting to make bad didactic art. But then again, the work in this exhibition purposefully plays with didacticism, so it felt like a relevant thing to channel and play with. I let my pomposity run free on this one and it felt good… I trust that viewers understand that the ‘footnotes’ are just one of many ways to engage with the work. The pictures themselves are quite direct and accessible I think.

LB: Yes, I definitely think this is true.

ER: Although I deliberately make work in a very eclectic way, I’ve noticed that I often hit the same note over and over again. For a picture to work, it needs to inhabit a certain level of productive ambiguity—a sweet spot where it seems to be doing one thing while also doing another thing at the same time. I try to make pictures that work on the viewer but also invite them to put some work in. These different moments in viewing / different levels of engagement are very important because I want to make pictures that function in a compound manner.

The references/footnotes (the works, texts and images used as starting points) are really just tools for thinking in the studio. I need these tools to make the work and I’m happy to talk about these tools but they’re not there to justify what I’m doing. Instead, I think with, through and against these things; they allow me to have a dialogue all by myself—and I either abstract, combine or put pressure on them.

LB: But when we discover these textual underpinnings they do lead us to think about their sources—here maybe pedagogy or visual literacy, or education?

ER: Education and pedagogy is definitely one of the main themes of this exhibition. For the past two years I’ve been teaching a ‘photographic research’ course in the MFA in photography at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, and this exhibition is very much a reflection on my new role as a young teacher who is trying to figure it out. From this position I find myself reflecting upon my time as a student in new ways. There are so many concerns and anxieties I had as a student that I could not process at the time, and now that I’m teaching I’m beginning to understand some of these things through my students' own concerns and anxieties. It's a confronting process.

This is not the first time I’ve used my day job as a starting point. My previous solo show at KIOSK/rhizome focused on my former job as an art worker in a gallery so it felt natural to have this exhibition speak to my current job as a teacher. In fact, two of the seven pictures in this exhibition are photographs of my students. I invited them to my studio and asked them to bring whatever texts we’d been reading in class and the pens, notebooks and coffee cups they’d usually have in the classroom. We staged something that I’d noticed is a very common occurrence during seminars: that moment when someone is trying to explain something complicated about the text we’re reading and does so by using the mundane objects at hand in front of them in order to ground their argument and make their thought less abstract. The result tends to be precarious and transient sculptural arrangements of water bottles, coffee cups, books and pens. This stacking of objects intended to create or convey meaning is quite similar to what I’ve noticed in many illustrative pictures, especially in stock images. Staging this trivial occurrence when someone is trying to illustrate/illuminate others on a particular idea was interesting to me because the results are simultaneously too generic and too specific.

The two texts seen as photocopies in these photographs of the students are Craig Owens’ The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism (1983) and Walter Benjamin’s The Author as Producer (1934). Two texts that happen to question the role of the artist in society. In the photograph of the student with Craig Owens’ text, you can see a reproduction of Martha Rosler’s famous piece The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems (1974/75), which critically deconstructs the documentary image through its relationship to text. Funnily enough, I only realized after making the picture that Florine (the student) was holding up a coffee cup and a pen in a way that mimics the idea of image vs text.

Emile Rubino, Made to Scale, 2024. Photo credit: Useful Art Services. Courtesy the artist and LambdaLambdaLambda

The nerdy footnote here is that, in The Author as Producer, Walter Benjamin criticizes New Objectivity photographers. Notably Albert Renger-Patzsch for the way his work makes: ‘misery itself an object of pleasure, by treating it stylishly and with technical perfection.’ For Benjamin, the presence of text in the form of a caption is necessary in order for photography to be political and to say more than ‘the world is beautiful.’ He writes: ‘What we should demand from photography is the capacity of giving a print a caption which would tear it away from fashionable cliches and give it a revolutionary use value.’ The thing is that photography inevitably trades in fashionable clichés.

There is another picture in the exhibition—titled Made to Scale—which directly emulates staged photographs by Allan Sekula (someone who was very attached to captions) that he made for his 1978-82 photo essay called School is a factory. Sekula photographed someone holding a plastic schoolhouse over a funnel filled with plastic figurines in front of the corporate landscapes near the school where he taught at the time in Southern California: he was denouncing the way in which students, regardless of what he taught them about art, would be funneled into these new corporations and become technicians... I sourced the same plastic schoolhouse online and made a very pop/toys’r’us version of this staged situation, focusing more on the gesture alone. This picture is probably the most obvious example of the way I was trying to mess around with this dichotomy between smart/critical vs not smart/not critical photography. In my experience, photography is rarely either just smart or just dumb, it’s most often smart and dumb at the same time, and that’s really the beauty of it.

LB: I hear that. I’ve been listening to Mark Fisher’s last lectures recorded at Goldsmiths just before he passed, and in one of them he talks about Lukács and his theory of reification. Reification, as I understand it, is where an ideology effectively imbeds itself so deeply that it takes on the quality of reality itself. He sees the power in undermining the naturalization of such an ideology and uncovering / describing the forces that make it work even though this new wrinkle is eventually integrated into the whole. Lukács is talking about capitalism but as Fisher was talking I kept thinking about photography. Coming home to your response made me smile. I feel that these tensions you’re interested in are related to Lukács’—where you’re employing the aesthetic of free signifying stock images to get at, or picture, the historical conditions that have brought us to this kind of generic, open-ended, repurposable signification. In a way, they’re kind of trashy, or they traffic in trashy, (which I say excitedly) and yet in another way, they function pedagogically as a kind of primer.

ER: One of Fisher’s students calls it ‘thing-ifaction,’ which I quite like. Fisher explains it in a nice way when he says that reification is the process by which ideology transforms what was not fixed (what was always in the process of becoming) into something that is seemingly permanent and therefore something that looks as if it cannot be changed. The work then is to raise consciousness so that the possibility of change becomes visible again. I guess that’s essentially what overtly political art aims to do, but I’m actually more interested in the political impotence of art, which is centered here. For this show, I was busy thinking through different historical instances of didactic and political art/photography that I admire and/or want to question: The German mid-twentieth-century artist Alice Lex-Nerlinger was concerned with making communist/feminist art that would communicate efficiently; Rodchenko and his productivist photography; Allan Sekula and his didactic documentary approach; and the apolitical or conservative ‘social aesthetic’ of stock images. It’s very liberating to take the political impotence of art (and the flat-footed aspects of photography) as a starting point for the work. I don’t mean that in a cynical or a pessimistic way. It’s more like acknowledging your own shortcomings so you don’t have to apologize for them.  

LB: I get that feeling—leaning into the anti-heroic without discarding the commitment to the need for real change.

ER: Exactly. And photography has a particularly insidious relationship with ideology. There’s something about the material ‘thinness’ of photography which actually makes it the perfect container for ideology. It’s in there yet it’s so thin that you don’t really see it. It works on you without you noticing that it’s working. It seems to me that under late capitalism, the kind of photography that serves capital and the kind of photography that attempts to operate a critique of capital have more in common than it might seem at first. One has to subvert or play with the codes of the other but in the end it’s more of a feedback loop. Both are just trying to communicate and neither is able to give the viewer much agency.

So forefronting trashiness is key. I would even say that photography is the quintessential trashy medium in that it is always cheaply imitative of something else (often something better), whether that thing is reality itself or another existing picture. As I was saying earlier, photography is derivative in nature. I’ve sort of doubled down on that aspect of photography because I imitate imitations and by doing so I create something else. But my pictures don’t necessarily make something invisible become visible. Perhaps it’s more accurate to think about it as a kind of conceptual bootlegging practice. Except that usually when you make a bootleg of something, it’s because the original thing has very specific or idiosyncratic features. But here, as you pointed out, these are more like primers, what defines them is a kind of blankness. I like the absurdity of making a bootleg of something that is generic to begin with. What defines a bootleg is that it is not a ‘fake,’ it has no intention of appearing to be the real thing. This is a really interesting relationship to the real. In a very simple way, it shows that reality can be re-imagined.

For a photograph to achieve a kind of artistic autonomy, it needs to be alienated from other potential functions so that autonomy becomes its predominant quality. What I was looking for in these pictures was a way for them to sit awkwardly between suggesting function and suggesting autonomy. I think that’s a way for pictures to appear in a perpetual process of becoming.

LB: I know we’re kind of going in circles here but I want to ask one last question about the character of the appropriation of other artists’ work in your show aside from this idea of bootleg-style. I’m particularly curious about the way that open quotation brings these other historical moments into the room together. It's a little like a dinner party, but maybe more like some sort of ventriloquism or puppet show. We’ve heard how you think about the medium but I’m also curious how you feel about the legacies of these characters who were so invested in radical change?

Emile Rubino, Poverty Remix (After Lex-Nerlinger), 2024. Photo credit: Useful Art Services. Courtesy the artist and LambdaLambdaLambda

ER: I thought it would be interesting to compare—or at least bring into proximity—this moment of photography (1920s/1930s) with the 1970s, another important moment for photography’s political claim, and then draw all of this closer to the present through references to stock imagery. In some cases, such as the work titled Poverty Remix (After Lex Nerlinger), which riffs on the photograms of Lex Nerlinger, it’s more of an homage. Lex Nerlinger is not very well known, despite the amazing work she produced and the courageous and complicated life she led. She was briefly imprisoned and much of her work was destroyed; she was a very committed communist and feminist artist advocating for reproductive rights and changed her name to Lex Nerlinger later in life to make it less gendered.

I first saw her cartoonish photograms representing workers and class inequalities in a major exhibition at the Pompidou in Paris devoted to Germany in the 1920s. I had never seen her work before and these photograms made with stencils cut from some sort of tissue paper really caught my attention. They’re naive but also beautiful and somehow felt really fresh to me. In her photogram called Arm und Reich (1930) she placed the bourgeoisie on one side, with each vignette representing a different kind of luxury lifestyle or leisure activity. And on the left, she placed the poor and working class, copying each vignette three times, so that for every bourgeois there are three times as many working class and poor people.

One of the vignettes representing the poor uses the figure of an amputee with crutches which is the one I decided to emulate by simply cutting out pieces of paper which I scanned on my flatbed scanner and reworked in Photoshop to look like a photogram. The final print is a laser-exposed silver gelatin print so it’s kind of a faux old photogram: if you look closely you can easily see the traces of coarse digital manipulation. So it really is just an homage/digital remix. The title, Poverty Remix, I borrowed from a poem by Anne Carson where she talks about the ancient Greek poet Hipponax, who was known for being physically deformed and for writing verses about poverty using coarse language. Hipponax is also known for pioneering a form of meter in poetry called the limping iambs, which brings the reader on the wrong ‘foot’ so to speak by reversing the stresses towards the end of a verse. Again, I thought it was interesting to bring these two things in proximity, at least for myself, since it shows how the figure of the limping man is a consistent way of illustrating poverty throughout the ages. I was at the Getty this summer and I saw this painting by Manet called La Rue Mosnier aux drapeaux (1878), which is the typical street view with French flags on a national holiday (many painters did that), but Manet included a man walking with crutches at the side of the street as a way of drawing attention to inequities and criticize patriotic sentiments.

But there was also this thing I found to be interestingly similar to Rodchenko’s cut-out figurines, whereby both he and Lex Nerlinger wanted to make radical/political art, and both of them resorted to little paper cutout figurines. There is something cute or slightly inadequate about it in both cases, which really fascinates me since, in my work, I'm curious to see what happens when a picture embodies its own contradictions.

Bringing these different artists together in order to make my work is very similar to hosting a dinner party for sure. You never really know what kind of discussion your guests are going to have when you invite people over. But still, I’ve made it convenient for myself because none of them are here to contradict me now, so I can indeed become a ventriloquist; I can organize the dinner but in the end they’re having a discussion that I’ve spent time scripting for them. For me, the best way to honor the artistic legacies of these artists is to question them and to keep their inquiries alive.